late to the party here, but I have a dell T3400 and its great. I ordered it with a decent video card and I paid $700 for it new. I have 4 22 inch monitors and I just love it. I use a notebook pc as well too. cannot be happier. I had a high powered high end HP before and just as happy with my Dell t3400
FYI.... I just replaced my oldest computer with another T3400.... I now have 4. The best thing about that is they all have the same BIOS and mobo. (I also have an NVS video card in each, so they run on the same video driver.) I can swap hard drives as necessary and they work just fine without doing anything else... saves time and effort with the backup routine. I don't know how much longer the T3400 will be around. It has socket 775 while newer computers have different. If you want a T3400 backup, probably should be getting it soon.
The only thing is i still dont know is if i can SLi or crossfire it, Intel ® X38 Express chipset is supposed to be SLi compatable but i have not seen anyone else try this, then again its not a "gaming" machine. On the other hand the cooling, and it being so quiet, just makes my heart melt, i litterally cannot hear anything, the only time i hear anything is when the video card gets warm and the fan is winding up. other than that. cant even tell its on. Yea i got lucky when i got it, i did order the same motherboard for this machine, i had thought that the board was dead on the first initial startup, i just had a 500 watt powersupply laying around and for some reason the board didnt like that, so i bought another board from a referbished seller and same thing, then i got the XPS 700 power supply and they both worked. so now i got a spare one if i fail an attempt on something, in return cost more than the barebones t3400. So why that many t3400's?
Well i found my answer, infact... just contacted dell. "Jeff, though the system can support two graphics cards concurently, SLI is not available." "SLI will only work with an nVidia chipset, this system uses the Intel Bearlake X chipset"
I run 2 during the day, a different one at night in a different room.. then one is for "other/spare"... My notebook is a Precision also... M4300. It's quite nice.